Quotes Tagged "18th-century"

To live is not to breathe but to act. It is to make use of our organs, our senses, our faculties, of all the parts of ourselves which give us the sentiment of our existence. The man who has lived the most is not he who has counted the most years but he who has most felt life.
Tags: rousseau, philosophy, enlightenment, 18th-century
As a convinced atheist, I ought to agree with Voltaire that Judaism is not just one more religion, but in its way the root of religious evil. Without the stern, joyless rabbis and their 613 dour prohibitions, we might have avoided the whole nightmare of the Old Testament, and the brutal, crude wrenching of that into prophecy-derived Christianity, and the later plagiarism and mutation of Judaism and Christianity into the various rival forms of Islam. Much of the time, I do concur with Voltaire, but not without acknowledging that Judaism is dialectical. There is, after all, a specifically Jewish version of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, with a specifically Jewish name—the Haskalah—for itself. The term derives from the word for 'mind' or 'intellect,' and it is naturally associated with ethics rather than rituals, life rather than prohibitions, and assimilation over 'exile' or 'return.' It's everlastingly linked to the name of the great German teacher Moses Mendelssohn, one of those conspicuous Jewish hunchbacks who so upset and embarrassed Isaiah Berlin. (The other way to upset or embarrass Berlin, I found, was to mention that he himself was a cousin of Menachem Schneerson, the 'messianic' Lubavitcher rebbe.) However, even pre-enlightenment Judaism forces its adherents to study and think, it reluctantly teaches them what others think, and it may even teach them how to think also.
Tags: voltaire, thought, study, rituals, return, religion, rebbes, rabbis, prophecy, prohibitions, plagiarism, old-testament, moses-mendelssohn, monotheism, messianism, menachem-mendel-schneerson, life, judaism, islam, isaiah-berlin, intellect, haskalah, germans, free-thought, exile, evil, ethics, enlightenment, education, dialectics, christianity, chabad-messianism, atheism, assimilation, antisemitism, 18th-century
There will be great reason to suspect the Men of jealousy; and it cannot be rash to say, that their only reason for locking up from us all the avenues of knowledge, is the fear of our excelling them in it. (...) Had we the same advantages of study allowed us which the Men have, there is no room to doubt but we should at least keep pace with them in the sciences, and every useful knowledge. It can only then be a mean dastardly jealousy in them to exclude us from those advantages, in which we have so natural a right to emulate them.
Tags: women-s-oppression, sexism, patriarchy, misogyny, men-threatened-by-women, male-privilege, knowledge, feminism, double-standards, 18th-century-feminism, 18th-century
Since the 18th century, many Western intellectuals have predicted religion's imminent demise.
Tags: demise, 18th-century, century, many, religion